Has “The Mooch” lost his mojo?
Anthony Scaramucci, who is famous for his 11-day stint as former President Donald Trump’s communications director, is facing a mass exodus of investors from his funds.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Mr. Scaramucci’s firm SkyBridge Capital had halted withdrawals from one of its smaller funds, Legion Strategies, which contains just over $200 million. But Mr. Scaramucci is also struggling to hold on to investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund, the SkyBridge Multi-Adviser Hedge Fund Portfolios, which managed as much as $2 billion at the end of March. Its investments lost nearly a quarter of their value in the second quarter.
Investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund are seeking to withdraw as much as $890 million, or about half of the money that it held as of the end of last month, Mr. Scaramucci told the DealBook newsletter. But many of those investors will be stuck in the fund for a while.
Under its rules, investors in the Multi-Adviser fund are allowed to withdraw money only during certain windows. Those used to occur four times a year, but SkyBridge cut them to twice a year in 2020, after big losses at the beginning of the pandemic. Overall redemptions are typically capped during each window.
Earlier this month, SkyBridge told its clients in a letter that its redemption window had been “oversubscribed” and that they would collectively receive only about 16 percent of the money they requested. The letter said it was issuing investors’ notes for that amount that would be paid no later than October.
Mr. Scaramucci’s losses come just over a year after SkyBridge’s pivot into crypto. SkyBridge’s flagship fund, which Mr. Scaramucci bought from Citigroup, has long specialized in buying and selling stakes of other hedge funds. For a time, that, along with strong performance in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, made him one of the most powerful players in the hedge fund industry.
In addition to the fund, SkyBridge held a widely attended annual conference in Las Vegas, called SALT, that drew big names from both Wall Street and politics.
Mr. Scaramucci says he is still a long-term believer in crypto, adding that about 22 percent of his flagship fund remained in crypto and related investments as of the end of last month.
“I am not smart enough to time the market,” he told the DealBook newsletter. “But we’ve done a tremendous amount of research and we think anyone who has will see that blockchain technology is good and is the future.”
